No Priors Ep. 43 | With Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI

(instrumental music) . Today on No Priors, we have an entrepreneur and executive Clara Shih. Clara is currently CEO of Salesforce AI, and before that was the CEO of Salesforce Service Cloud and of Hearsay Social, a company she's co-founder of, as well as she was a board member at Starbucks. Clara currently leads artificial intelligence efforts across Salesforce, including AI Copilot and agent platform, model development, go-to-market, growth, adoption, partnerships, ecosystems, and secure responsible AI. It's so much stuff, I got tired just t- going through all of it, so she must be exhausted. Um, today on No Priors, we talk with Clara about Salesforce's forays into generative AI and the future evolution of AI in the enterprise. So thank you so much for joining us today, Clara.

Sure. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan.

So I was hoping to just start off with, um, how you ended up taking on the CEO role for Salesforce AI. I know before that you were working o- on, um, Service Cloud, and then we had sort of this big wave of innovation happen in term of generative AI, and Salesforce has been quite fast to adapt to it. So I was just hoping to learn a little bit more about how your role evolved and the c- the kinds of areas that you focus on today.

Yeah. I mean, if you go back to Hearsay days, and, uh, Elad, you'll, you might know this, Hearsay had and continues to have NLP to mine the messages that, that come through. And Hearsay mines it for both lead generation opportunities as well as t- to detect compliance infractions. So that was like really when, you know, just from an empirical standpoint, I got closer to, to AI and ML. And this is like all, you know, pre-large language models. And then when I joined Service Cloud, it's like almost three years ago, when you think about the customer service world, and there's a lot of AI, there's been chatbots for many years, and we were using very early, you know, pre-GPT types of transformer models to do that. And just as we started playing around with, with, with our own models and we saw OpenAI models and the ecosystems models get better and better, it just became obvious that this would be a core part of Service Cloud going forward. So I'd say probably, you know, a year and a half ago is when, you know, in the Service Cloud world, my engineering leader, Jayesh, and I, we really started to, to double down on these experiments, more prototypes. We were working with a c- a couple customers, um, including Juk- Gucci to develop very early prototypes of what now has become Service GPT, and we were just learning and, and iterating and figuring things out as we, as we went. Well, then, of course, fast-forward to last year, ChatGPT, um, is launched, and now every customer is super interested in AI. And, and across Salesforce, you know, I think there wa- there was a sudden, you know, wake-up moment to say, "How do we apply large language models to every cloud?" And so I think we were in a position of saying, "Hey, here's what we've learned working with Gucci, working with, uh, these other prototype customers, and let's start to think about how this applies to sales and marketing and commerce and Slack. And by the way, instead of each of us building this separately, how do we create a common platform and shared services for everything from model fine-tuning to prompt builder to the trust layer and the gateway so that we can all go really fast and also empower our ecosystem to do so?" So that was formalized into a separate role and this new, new role that I, I took on about six or seven months ago.